Mad Dog Magick

A continuing series of notes, thoughts and experiments that pertain to our own magickal work and may be of use to others in the same or similar path.

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Work On Self

In the ordinary course of life as human animals our attention flows untrained from one thing to another. Whatever is loudest, brightest, closest, or most thrilling captivates this precious resource, this little understood commodity. Reflexively, our mood changes constantly as well, contorted in one way or another in response to external stimuli, blindly following our unguided attention.When you are constantly wrapped up in this shifting, this loss of attention, you can’t really be free, you can’t make any choices, you can’t do anything seriously. You will merely move from one attention grabbing person, place or thing to the next, responding emotionally to each new source of stimulation with astoundingly mechanical reliability.We react. Clowns cause fear, praise arouses pleasure, a traffic jam equals anger. If being ordered around by your boss made you irritable today, there is no reason to suspect that you might enjoy the experience tomorrow.Being happy, being sad, angry, or fearful, these are not things that we do, these are things that do us. We react automatically to whatever stimulus we encounter.We assume that these reactions are somehow more than arbitrary, that if something pleases or displeases us there is a fundamental justification for the response.If my spouse cheats on me I feel that I should be sad and angry, I have every right to it. I will feel that it is my spouse's fault that I am angry.I have never considered that my response to the situations and individuals around me comes from within me. It is particular to me. It is a reaction I learned early in life from my parents, my teachers, the television and my peers and I have repeated it mechanically so often that it feels “right.”We feel that these reflexive states of being are dictated by who we are, when really we are being dictated by them.Who are you anyway? What are you? What is the nature of this existence?Most of us have not considered what it means to be a person. We have not asked ourselves, “what am I? What function do I serve?”Nobody else asked us either. In fact we have been informed of who we are by others who have never wondered what they were. To delve into such a question would mean directing our attention inward, placing it on our own self rather than allowing it to drift over whatever new thing calls to it.

When I was a child I was very concerned with the question: “what am I?”It seems as if immediately after being informed of who I was, and consequently forgetting what I am or might be, I began to try to find my way back to it. At least as many years as was spent forgetting myself came to be invested in trying to remember it again.By the time I was in the fifth grade I became very convinced, walking home from school one day, that I did understand something about myself and reality and it was summed up best by these lines from a popular nursery song; life is but a dream.I am a dream. One dream of many. There are dreams within dreams to consider.If I am a dream, then there is a dreamer, there’s something else, an eternal something, an other of some kind.It took more time for me to build on this theory, to move beyond “what am I?” to “why might I be?“To me it seems that one function of the human being is to establish contact with that dreamer, that eternal being. Just doing that is a lot harder than it sounds.

Doing that in as many different ways and different spaces as possible is the function of a human being in a system that involves this organic existence but is not only this organic existence.We do this with our attention, by turning it in on ourselves, in on the dreamer.This is an non-ordinary application of attention. This is going beyond the course of life as human animals. This is applying attention intentionally rather than accidentally. This is trading the subjectivity involved in riding the roller coaster of human emotion for the objectivity of a waking state; a moment of lucidity in which I remember myself as the eternal dreamer.This is what I call “work on self.”

Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Offering

Now afterwards, Eve bore Cain, their son. Cain, their son, Eve bore afterwards, after their awakening and expulsion from the fecund gardens of blindness. In the desert lands the child grew. Under the open blue sky, he talked, becoming a man.

Cain cultivated the land. The dry barren earth parted, cracking with deep groans to receive his seed. Each one, containing within it all the information of life was placed in the earth womb. Dank and wet, ready for birth. He tended them with care. Knowingly, secretly, he worked to re-create the garden, to place in it a tree of Knowledge, to re-awaken the red and black serpent coiled around its base, to once again taste forbidden Gnosis.

When the moon was ripe for such things, under a sky full of lights, Adam again knew his wife, and again becoming pregnant, she bore Abel, son of the sun.

Abel grew to be a herdsman of sheep. Solitary among many, he wandered through the dry lands, weaving an existence between mountains, fending off wolves so that his lambs would grow fat, becoming a wolf himself.

When the season was right for such things, Cain brought in from the crops of his field, the fruits of his labor. Olives, date, plums- their baskets were full and the altar was scented with rose water and jasmine. To the stone pillars Abel brought an offering from among his lambs, an offering of death and blood, the finest of his flock.

The Ruler Of All turned his face toward the votive offerings of Abel and was satiated by what he tasted, but he did not accept the votive offerings of Cain who had labored the earth womb to create life. Cain felt only silence and a harsh dry breeze like a slap on his leathery skin.

In his arrogance, with bright power bellowing from his naked loins, Cain said, "It is I who am The Ruler Of All; there is none apart from me. It is The Ruler Of All who is I. Apart from me there is none. With my own hands I bring about creation. From clay and water, it is I who brings life to this land."

And, having expelled his power, the power to expel- that is, the power to blasphemy, to speak,he pursued it. Cain pursued Abel, his brother. Down to chaos and the abyss he pursued him. Into the dark womb of earth mother, where knotted trees grow below the surface, having learned how to blossom without light.

And The Ruler Of All said to Cain, carnal Cain, now covered in blood and grime, "Where is Abel, your brother?"

Cain answered by saying, "Am I, then, my brother's keeper?” A smile curling on his upper lip, for he was now his brother’s keeper, a shepherd of men.

The Ruler Of All said to Cain, "Listen! The voice of your brother's blood is crying up to me!” And Cain was pleased and watched as The Ruler Of All turned his face to the offering of death and blood, fleeting life with all its energy. The Ruler Of All took sustenance from the death of Abel, more so than the lamb that had been presented at the altar, and said to Cain even as they were one, “You have sinned with your mouth. It will return to you, anyone who kills Cain will let loose seven acts of vengeance.”

Like the snake, Cain shed his old skin and became new, leaving behind him a shadowy reflection of himself. Blind, groaning and trembling upon the earth, he left his shadowy form behind and the instructor once more sought a new form.

Thursday, March 03, 2011

The Spear Of Longinus

There is a correlation between the spear of Longinus and the Holy Grail and the penis and the vagina.Whenever the grail is mentioned I am reminded of the idea that references to the "holy grail" may be references to the womb of Mary Magdalene. It's part of the idea that the Merovingian princes were the descendants of Christ and that "the cup that held Christ's blood" could be a subtle reference to her.If the grail is the cup that held Christ’s blood, then the spear itself would be Christ, "the anointed one", tearing into matter, penetrating the physical. Just as the spear dips into the body of Jesus, the mythological Jesus Christ is the God that dipped into the body of a man(or woman.) This dipping is the anointing itself.Rumor is that the ancient kings were anointed by the transformed menstrual substances of the "Goddesses". We can take those goddesses or Anunaki queens to be metaphors for the material, matter, mother, Mary.To be anointed is to penetrate the physical realm. The kings passing the spear from one generation to the next is symbolic of their Kingship. A king, in the old world sense, is a descendant of God. He is God embodied on earth. He is the spear thrust into the womb of the world. He is the anointed one. It is interesting that even modern monarchs of the British Empire continue to be anointed with Holy oil as part of their coronation ceremonies.In Evangelion, the spear is thrust out into space and enters orbit around the moon. I would see this as a reversal of this concept. Rather than a being of the higher dimensions penetrating the lower dimensions, in Evangelion it is a being from the lower dimensions penetrating the higher realm. In a sense this would make unit zero the antichrist."Antichrist" is the English translation of the original Greek Aντίχριστος. It is made up of two root words, αντί + Χριστός (anti + Christos). "Αντί" can mean not only “against” and “opposite of”, but also “in place of", The Antichrist would then be the one who is in place of the anointed one.Interesting then, that within the world of Evangelion, Rei, the pilot of unit zero, is a replica of some kind, a place holder for the spirit that moves the body of the Eva. She is also, at that moment when she retrieves the spear and thrusts it toward the moon, replacing Shinji who might be considered to be the actual Christ.He has just physically become one with his Eva, the spear in the side of the beast, making him the anointed one.